Sunday, January 26, 2014

One thing on which all streams of Judaism agree is that some
of the core principles of the Jewish religion revolve around g'milut Chassidim,
kvod adam l'chavero and tikkun olam. But what exactly do those concepts
involve?

High School students at Yeshivat Kadima of St. Louis have
been exploring these questions as part of their course on Jewish History and
Contemporary Jewish Issues. The students integrate textual studies with history
and real life dilemmas as they explore Jewish issues of today in light of
Jewish sources and Jewish history.

The second semester of the course began in the beginning of
January with a focus on the relationships between chessed and the students' own
lives in light of a variety of the teachings of the Rambam, one of the greatest
medieval Jewish thinkers. During January, the class focused on "How to be
Good." After viewing a thought provoking video entitled "For Goodness
Sakes" the students took a poll in which they were asked to note some of
the traits that make a person a good person according to the video. A second
poll was used to compare traits that the students feel make one a good person
according to Judaism. The students then moved to a linoboard
where they expanded on their answers and expressed their thoughts about how
Judaism emphasizes "caring for 'the Other'".

The next lesson involved creating a Powerpoint
Presentation which focused on definitions of goodness that could be derived
from reading traditional texts, particularly those authored by Rambam. A
different textual source was presented on each slide, and each student was
asked to add his/her own slide to the presentation with a modern-day example of
the "chesed" implied in the source. In addition to the feedback given
by the instructor, the students were asked to review and comment on each
other's work.

The focus of the discussion then turned to the concept of "tzelem Elokim" – "the image of G-d" as the fundamental principle behind the Jewish concepts of g'milut Chassidim, kvod adam l'chavero and tikkun olam. Each student was encouraged to look at how he/she embodies "tzelem Elokim" by reflecting on the following questions:

1. Which of your qualities most reflects "tzelem Elokim"? Give an example of when your behavior reflects "tzelem Elokim".

2. Which quality that reflects "tzelem Elokim" do you respect in someone you look up to? This can be a family member, friend, teacher, anyone in your circle of life. Give an example of what this person did that makes him/her an example of "tzelem Elokim".

The students submitted their own thoughts and then commented on the answers that their peers had offered to further expand and clarify their visions of "tzelem Elokim".

The next session focused on giving Tzedakah, particularly
on whether giving Tzedakah is a choice or an obligation? The students examined
different sources that command us to give tzdekka and commented on the sources
that they found to be most convincing. They then studied Rambam's pyramid of
the 8 levels of giving Tzedakah and created a class PPT in which each student
discussed one of the Rambam's levels of Tzedakah and related it to their own personal
experience.

To summarize the lesson the students were presented with
halachot and dilemmas which elicited serious thought about issues that are
raised by the injunction to give Tzedakah. The students were asked to comment
on those issues as they considered their own feelings and the dictates of Jewish
law.

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Half a year into the JconnecT Learning program, the online Hebrew school
participants are connecting to the wider Jewish community by exploring their
own Jewish heritage.

JconnecT was established in 2010 as a vehicle which allows Jewish
youngsters aged 11-14 to learn about Judaism in an elearning format that meets
each student's specific needs and interests. The students gather, online, from
many different areas of North America, to learn, discuss, present and discover
the different aspects of their Judaism. Some of the students are homeschooled
while others attend a traditional public school for their secular studies.
JconnecT includes participants who live in remote areas in which they don't
have access to a traditional afternoon Hebrew school, as well as students who
are not comfortable with the existing Hebrew school framework that exists in
their neighborhood. JconnecT provides the students with an open atmosphere to
ask questions and to explore various aspects of their Jewish heritage and
connections to Israel.

The second semester of the 2013-2014 JconnecT year began with a summary
of the students' own families' histories. Students chatted in what they knew
about their own families' origins and histories and then located their
ancestral homes on the online map. The kids then viewed an online map which
displayed numbers of Jews who immigrated to Israel in the years 1948-1950.
Discussion questions included:

1.Which country had the most number of people who immigrated to
Israel?

2. Why were so many Jews
immigrating to Israel from those countries during those years?

3.Are there surprises on the map?

The students were able to link the post-Holocaust persecutions in
Eastern Europe and North Africa and the issue of Jewish refugees with the
immigration numbers. Many of the students also expressed their surprise that
large numbers of Jews once lived in "exotic" countries such as
Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Iraq and even India.

During the next part of the lesson, the students -- mostly Ashkanazi --
moved on to learn more about the Sephardic community. The concepts
"Ashkanazi" and "Sepharadi" were new to most of the
students who viewed the map to identify countries that are associated with
Ashkanazi and Sepharadi communities. A few students mentioned items of interest
that they knew about North African Jews -- dress, food customs, holiday
traditions -- and then the kids watched a video which takes a humorous look at the unique aspects of
Ashkanazi and Sepharadi communities.

After watching the video the students reviewed some of the information
that they'd learned from the video as they annotated an online chart with
comparisons of Ashkanazi and Sepharadi music, language, food, names, holidays,
beliefs and more.

The lesson ended with a closer look at food traditions, which fascinated
the kids. Some unusual types of Jewish ethnic foods were presented and the students
considered which foods they'd like to try and why. They then shared their own
families' Jewish food specialties with a look at the history of some of these dishes.

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Last week the Prime Minister's office announced
that Israel would be investing billions of dollars in the coming years to
strengthen the Jewish identity of Diaspora Jews. The announcement was made as part of the
government's initiative to reverse the trend towards assimilation by helping
Jewish communities throughout the world find strategies that bolster their
members' Jewish identity.

One successful program, the Lauder e-Learning School,
is already functioning in many countries in Central and Eastern Europe. The
school offers online Jewish education for young Jewish students who live hours
from a Jewish hub and have no access nearby to Jewish education. The majority
of these students have little Jewish background but they are excited about
learning and enthusiastic about the program. The parents also have minimal
Jewish education -- some grew up without even knowing that they were Jewish --
but they want their children to have the opportunities for Jewish learning that
were denied to them.

The program offers Jewish education classes — both Hebrew courses
and a wide range of Jewish studies” curriculum. These courses are supplemented
by elective instruction in three foreign languages (German, French and English)
to broaden the students' education and draw the students to the school.
Students are invited to select any of the free classes that are offered on
weekday afternoons, and they meet online in age-specific groups. Instructors,
who were trained and are mentored by Jerusalem
EdTech Solutions (JETS Israel) director Smadar Goldstein, present the computer conferencing classes
online and the students interact, answer questions, and complete assignments on
tablets which are provided by the Lauder e-Learning School.

So far almost 50 young Jewish students have taken part in the
program. These youngsters are often the only Jews in their public school
classrooms and the e-Lauder school is their sole opportunity to interact with
other Jews in their own age group. In
addition to their online activities the students are invited to participate in
an annual weekend Shabbaton in Warsaw hosted by the Lauder-Morsaha School. They
are also invited to attend the annual Ronald
S. Lauder Foundation summer camp.

The Lauder e-School was designed with the long-term goal of reviving
Jewish life in Eastern Europe. The school's administration works with the
Jewish leadership of each of the countries in which is functions including
Germany, Slovakia, Poland and the Czech Republic. A similar program is slated
to open in Moscow next year. The Warsaw e-School, founded two years ago, is the
latest facet in Poland’s Jewish revival, which is bringing Polish Jewry to the
level of any small Jewish community in Europe.

Sunday, January 19, 2014

Last week I began my second year of
online learning with a 7th grade class in Deerfield Illinois. For
me, living in Israel, this means waking up at 3:00a.m. to teach the 7:00p.m.
Deerfield class. But despite the challenge (it usually takes me through Shabbat
to get my internal clock back on track) I enjoy the interaction with the kids
who are engaged, curious and ready to explore new concepts and ideas.

My 2014 class started off on an
awkward note. We are using the Webex conferencing software to facilitate the
class and, immediately after I launched the class, I received a message from
Webex to tell me that the "audio part of the conference is not working
today." Since the class runs for half an hour, there seemed to be no
reason to close the class and start it again which would have taken up more
than half the class time so we decided to conduct the entire class on chat.

Luckily I'm a fast typist and I
spent the next hour typing my heart out -- answering the kids' chat questions
and comments, giving them directions and providing them with an overview of
what subjects would be covered during their 9-week class on "Israel."

The second challenge occurred when
Facebook failed me. To show the kids some of the unique aspects of Israel I had
planned to have them take a look at the Facebook "Only In Israel"
page. (https://www.facebook.com/groups/OnlyInIsrael/). I created a username and
password so that the students would be able to click in but Facebook doesn't
like multiple sign-ins from multiple devices and they effectively blocked my
activity.

Live and learn. We moved on to the
next activity and I quickly located an appropriate video that would fill in the
class time.

Lessons learned:

1.There's
more than one way to skin a cat. If something goes wrong, you can usually find
your way around it and should be prepared to do so. In the future, I'm going to
make sure that I always have an alternate platform available -- probably Skype.
I don't like skype as well as Webex because it doesn't offer the same opportunity
to post documents, videos and other materials directly on the screen. However,
it would have been a lot easier to have moved over to Skype and continue the
class there than to type like a madwoman for 60 minutes.

2.Always
have a back-up lesson plan. I've found that, for a half-hour lesson, we
generally have time for 2-3 activities including preparatory activities, the
core information that I want to present and follow-up activities. It's
important to have one extra activity ready to supplement anything that doesn't
work.

When
you're counting on technology to facilitate your lesson plan, you might as well
assume that something won't work. If everything goes smoothly, that's great.
But I will, in the future, be preparing a back-up plan for all of my
lessons.

3.The
kids will give you the benefit of the doubt. I don't think that I could get
away with a chat lesson a second time but here, the students were willing to
give me the benefit of the doubt. They participated fully and we completed the
material. It didn't go as any of us had intended but no one took advantage of
the technological lapse and they did their best to ensure that the lesson was,
under the conditions, a success.

Institutions
and educators have struggled for the past 70 years to bring the concept of a
"Lost World" to Holocaust education in a way that students can
identify withn it. A recent class with Temple Emanuel students explored methods
of engaging the students in an interactive give-and-take that promotes
sensitivity to a world that previously seemed distant.

A
sample community, the Hassidic community which lost a large percentage of its
members during the Holocaust, was examined. The students viewed a video about
Hassidim and considered Hassidic values which center on family, spirituality,
modesty, joy in life, holiday celebrations, pride in heritage and looking at
the good in everything that happens. The teachers elicited the similarity
between these Hassidic values and the students' own values.

The
students created a canvas on a linoboard
that summarized some of what they learned about Hassidim, and to present their
thoughts about their unique lifestyle and beliefs.

The
lesson continued with a look at Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira
-- known as Eish Kodesh, an exceptional Jewish leader who lived and died in the
Warsaw Ghetto. The students were presented with a Google
document that gave an outline of Rabbi Shapira's life. They were asked to
comment on different facets of his life, including why he was called the
"Eish Kodesh"

Smadar
announced to the students that she is planning to visit their classroom in a
few weeks to meet with them and learn together face-to-face, and asked them to
begin to think about an artifact to donate to a class scrapbook that will
showcase the students' Holocaust studies.

Thursday, January 9, 2014

Why are we often told to remember bad events
like the Alamo, the war with Amalek, and of course, the Holocaust? An
innovative online course entitled " Remembrance and Rebuilding",
presented by JETS to 7th grade students at Temple Emanuel of Pascack
Valley, began with this essential question. The students began to grapple with
the question by offering thoughtful answers through online messaging. The
teachers, Smadar Goldstein and Michal Lashansky, then presented the students
with several different ways in which the Holocaust is memorialized today, and
asked them to select the one that they felt was most meaningful to them and to
explain why. This assignment was completed by posting virtual sticky notes on a
linoboard, an interactive online social media bulletin board. The teachers then
asked the students to comment on each other's posts, after which the class
discussed the different thoughts that had been expressed on the linoboard. It
was an example of collaborative learning at its best.

Why are the students responding online? In
addition to the unique content of the curriculum, the "Remembrance and
Rebuilding" course is also innovative in its venue. The students are not
sitting in the same room, and teachers Smadar and Michal are not even in the
same country. Rather, the students participate in the course by logging in from
their homes, and the teachers present the class from Jerusalem through computer
conferencing technology. The class was organized by Rabbi Shelley Kniaz, Religious School Director Temple Emanuel of Pascack Valley as a way to allow students to approach their
study of contemporary Jewish history in a highly engaging atmosphere of
interactive learning.

Smadar
and Michal consider themselves "teachers without borders", as they
utilize the online platform to allow students to learn in a context that is not
confined to their local setting:

The
first part of the course focuses on the Holocaust, utilizing memorials to the
Holocaust in Israel and America as a context for considering what we should
remember, and why. Students will pay virtual visits to a number of Holocaust
memorials in Israel and to the Holocaust Museum in Washington in their quest to
answer these questions. The final session of this section discusses the concept
of "remembering the exodus from Egypt" as a pretext for understanding
how the focus on "remembering" in Judaism is designed to serve as a
catalyst for social activism.

The
latter part of the course focuses on Jewish life in Israel in both ancient
times and in the modern State of Israel, and the notable influence of the
memory of the exodus from Egypt and of the Holocaust on Israeli society. The
main topics include the mandate for creating a just society in Israel, the
importance of Jewish self-defense, and the centrality of Jerusalem for Jews
throughout the world. Students will, of course, experience Israeli society in a
unique way through their Jerusalem based learning.

The
JETS teachers believe that history can be learned most effectively when
students are encouraged to relate to it in a personal way. Students were asked
to present their own connections to the Holocaust. Several of the students have
family members who survived the Holocaust and they shared snippets of their
stories. Michal then told the students about her own grandfather's story -- his
escape from Nazi-occupied Poland, his struggles during the war years and his
anguish at being separated from his family. The students expressed surprise at
how such a young man could persevere in such horrible conditions and at the
travels and difficulties that Michal's grandfather endured in order to
survive.

Michal summarized her grandfather's story by
discussing some of the things that the family learned as a result of her
grandfather's experiences:

a.The importance of family and Judaism in their lives. Michal's
grandfather honored his family by raising
his own children in a Jewishly-rich environment

b.The importance of establishing a personal connection with the victims.
In Michal's case, her trip to Poland established a connection between her and
her grandfather's family, and strengthened her own commitment to perpetuate
their memory.

The students then viewed a movie, 94 Maidens,
in which an interviewer questioned college students in Pennsylvania about their
knowledge of the Holocaust. The majority of the students knew very little --
most were barely able to articulate exactly what the Holocaust was, where it
occurred or who the victims were. This movie made a great impression on the
students and a lively discussion ensued after the screening with the students considering
how to best ensure that the holocaust will never be forgotten. Rabbi Kniaz reminded the students that their class would be responsible for
planning and leading the Yom HaShoah commemoration at Temple Emanuel in the
spring. She suggested that, throughout the course, they consider how to incorporate their ideas of Holocaust commemoration into the spring
program.

At the conclusion of the class, the students
reviewed the activities of the previous hour, noting which activities were most
meaningful for each participant and why.
If the first class is any indication, the Remembrance and Rebuilding
course at Temple Emmanuel will be engaging, exciting, enriching, meaningful,
and of course, memorable.

Sunday, January 5, 2014

The
culmination of the first semester of JETS'
Contemporary Jewish Issues course at Yeshivat Kadimah in St. Louis
centered on the students' projects in
which each student was assigned to explore, research
and present a subject or an issue that concerns today's Jewish community. In
this presentation, the students were requested to relate the issue to concerns
of Jews who lived during the 1st - 3rd centuries C.E.

The
students selected a wide variety of subjects ranging from wars and heroines to
Israel as a high-tech nation, and even Jewish hats.

Following
each student's presentation of his or her topic, the subjects that the students
had chosen were further examined with follow-up activities. Students were asked to review their peers' projects and make comments, add
information and otherwise expand on each theme.

In
this phase of the learning, the students became teachers, which is a very
powerful learning experience. Seeing is believing – view some of the
presentations for yourselves:

Friday, January 3, 2014

How does our individual identity interact with our collective identity
as members of the Jewish community?

This is a complicated question. Every Jewish individual relates to their
Jewish identity in a different way. Some people are very observant but don't
consider Judaism as a nationality or a unique culture. Others relate to the
national or cultural aspects of Judaism while choosing to ignore the religious
characteristics of Judaism.

As part of JETS Shutafut/Partnership program, middle school students
from Emek HaHula Regional School in Northern Israel and the Talmud Torah of
Edmonton Canada were asked to "Map your Jewish Identity." The
mind-mapping was conceived as a tool for encouraging the students to consider
how their own personal identity integrates into their Jewish identity.

Using the MindMeister Brainstorming tool, the students were asked to
create a mind-map that would capture each individual student's stream of
consciousness as he/she considered the different roles that play out in his/her
life.

Students were asked to go to Mindmeister.com and create a bubble with their name in the
middle. From there, they were asked to draw lines to additional bubbles that
would express the different roles that they fill in their lives.
Brother/Sister? Caretaker? Partner in family responsibilities? Friend? Gamer?
Environmental activist? Volunteer? Student? Each student needed to consider how
they view their own roles in the family/community and how others see them.

Following that exercise, the students moved to a linoboard where they
were asked to expand on their personal identities and point to elements --
values, experiences, ideals, etc -- that connect them to the wider Jewish
community.

This mindmapping lesson was designed to foster the students' self-awareness
of their personal identies, and how fit into a wider identification with the
Jewish community. It was, however, a valuable experience for the educators as
well. For them, the significance this discussion related to uncoverng the
knowledge and the tools that will enable an individual to become more aware of
their personal Jewish identity and to grow Jewishly.

About Me

About the author
Smadar Goldstein is an online educator based in Jerusalem, Israel, who has taught in over 20 schools in three continents, and feels the potential of online learning has just begun. Smadar is the Founder and Director of JETS, Judaic online and distance learning providers. She's passionate about merging the movements of yoga into online learning. Follow Smadar on Twitter @jetsisrael.